Expressions Apple blocks: dictator Trump, Tibetan independence and Russian troop deployment
The iPhone keyboard blocks nearly one hundred thousand words and expressions in about thirty languages when a user tries to type them using the faster swipe-typing feature, and the list includes not only vulgar and offensive words but also political expressions.
The discovery was made back in September by American developer Derik Kaufman, who published the list on the website swipeblocked.com. Kaufman noticed that swipe-typing got stuck on expressions like “white man,” but not on “black man.” He then used the OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code programming tools to find the list within iOS. Matt Suiche, an engineer at the cybersecurity firm Tolmo, independently extracted the same list and compared it with Apple’s internal data. Kaufman’s full list, filterable by language, can be browsed HERE.
Most of the list consists of vulgar or offensive words, or terms related to drugs, sex or violence, but it also contains political expressions. In English, alongside “Dictator Trump” and “Sleepy Joe” (Trump’s nickname for Biden), the list also includes “right wing conspiracy,” “Tibetan independence” and “United Ireland.” On the Hindi list, negative terms about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are restricted; on the Hebrew list, the term “occupied territories” is blocked; and on the French list, the phrase “immigration is too high” has been restricted. The Russian list contains 637 entries, most of them vulgar, but some are political or military in nature. According to Meduza, these include expressions referring to the deployment of troops, a phrase referencing the 2008 war in Georgia, and a hard-to-interpret expression about Putin.
Apple declined to comment on Kaufman’s findings and did not explain why it restricts certain political expressions. According to the company, users can always type the words they want and can reject the suggested autocomplete at any time, and the keyboard has been set up so as not to suggest inappropriate or offensive words.
The keyboard’s behavior is not the first scandal surrounding Apple. In February 2025, the iPhone’s dictation feature briefly replaced the word “racist” with “Trump,” which the company attributed to phonetic similarity in its speech-recognition model. More seriously, Apple has repeatedly bowed to pressure from Moscow in the past. In 2019, Apple Maps showed Crimea as part of Russia for its Russian users; in 2021, during the Duma elections, it removed Alexei Navalny’s team’s “smart voting” app from the Russian App Store; and in 2024, at the request of Russia’s media regulator, it deleted dozens of VPN apps from the Russian store that users had relied on to bypass censorship. The current list gives the impression of an overzealous, all-encompassing filter rather than specifically pro-Russian censorship. Still, it is troubling that a company that markets itself as a protector of users’ privacy and freedom secretly decides which political expressions to make harder to type, and refuses even to disclose this.
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